For the second time in a month, a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy has shot to death an armed teenager with mental health issues, Sheriff Shannon Dicus said Wednesday while calling on the county to improve mental health services to families to prevent similar tragedies.
Deputies had taken the 17-year-old boy to Desert Valley Hospital in Victorville three days earlier after he had cut himself. He was being transferred Tuesday from the hospital to a mental health facility when he escaped, Dicus said at a news conference at sheriff’s headquarters in San Bernardino.
At around 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, the teen, a foster youth who lives in Hesperia, showed up at the home in the 17100 block of Forest Hills Drive in Victorville where his sisters live in foster care, Dicus said. A person at the home called deputies to come detain him, Dicus said, because he had caused trouble there before.
The teen, who had a knife, locked himself in the bathroom, and deputies tried for about a half hour to get him to come out.
But when the boy, who was not identified by the sheriff, threatened to harm himself, deputies kicked down the door and tried to apprehend him, Dicus said. A video and still images of the encounter presented at the news conference showed the teen holding a knife. Deputies pepper-sprayed him, and one deputy’s hand was sliced by the knife.
The teen was backed into a bathtub, where he was shot. He was pronounced dead at a hospital.
“Our hearts go out to the families involved in this case. This is a tragedy,” Dicus said.
This is one of two video clips provided by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department of them trying to detain a 17-year-old threatening himself with a knife on April 2 in Victorville. They wound up shooting and killing him. Warning: Disturbing images. pic.twitter.com/C9ShPm3KDy
— Brian Rokos (@BrianRokos) April 3, 2024
Dicus said that had deputies waited for a mental health worker to arrive, the teen could have harmed himself with the knife. And the teen would have first had to be safely detained before a mental health worker could talk to him, the sheriff said.
Dicus said deputies successfully had detained the teen “many” times before.
Such was also the case with 15-year-old Ryan Gainer, the autistic teen who was shot to death outside his Victorville home on March 9 as he chased a deputy while wielding a hoe. Deputies were called to the home after Gainer threatened family members and damaged the home, the Sheriff’s Department said.
Dicus said the difference, on the days when Gainer and the 17-year-old were killed, is that deputies were met with violence.
As he did after Gainer died, Dicus said parents need more mental health options for their children.
“Obviously, we have had a number of these situations occur here,” Dicus said. “The corrections environment and our public environment have been challenged a number of times where the only mental health resource we have in our community is law enforcement, and that’s the only 24/7 resource that we have.”
Dicus was asked what he’d like to be different about the system.
“What I would change is that parents would have the ability that when their children are in crisis to have a place to be able to go 24/7 so they don’t have to involve law enforcement. Unfortunately, when these kids degrade to the point where they become violent toward the family members, they have to call us. If they’re able to interact before because they know their children, perhaps we can get them on medication and have a professional take a look at them, and certainly have better outcomes than we are having right now,” Dicus said.
A request for comment on Dicus’ statements was made to county mental health officials Wednesday.
